Racial Segregation based on Black Boy by Richard Wright - Essay Example

Racial Segregation in Black Boy Order No.168837 May 2007 Black Boy is a fictionalised story of Richard Wright. The Richard Wright writes about his life, his experiences of growing up in the South in the early part of the 20th century. It is set in a period, the early 1990s when racism was common. It is a story of his struggle against racism, the prejudices he faced, the hunger, hatred, humiliation and beatings he had to face. He struggled not because of his character or because of his ideas, but for the fact that he was a black.

America at that time was going through a complex phase. On one side you had the Jim Crow laws and the rise of Klu Klux Klan, a white racist group that lynched, kidnapped, beat, or even murdered blacks to prove their supremacy. On the other side African American culture, its literature and arts flourished giving rise to the Harlem Renaissance. Richard Wright fought hard to resist segregation and refused to be forced into subservience as most of the blacks of that period did. As we read about his childhood one can visualise the sufferings and humiliation the African Americans had to endure in the early 1990s.

In his book Wright portrays all the violence, brutality, despair and powerlessness that goes with racism. The whites abused him physically and verbally. In the book there is mention of how when he was young he had to suffer regular physical and verbal abuse in his workplace and how his white colleagues even went to the extent of hitting him with a bottle for not addressing a white man as "sir". Right from the first chapter Wright tries to portray the injustices the black people have to face daily.

“for the first time I noticed that there were two lines of people at the ticket window, a “white” line and a “black” line. During my visit at Granny’s a sense of the two races had been born in me with sharp concreteness that would never die until I died." (Wright R, 1945) These lines from Black Boy show that Wright understood what it was to be a black boy right from his childhood days. The fear, the violence the blacks faced everyday is beautifully put forth in the book. Both the blacks and whites resorted to violence whenever they wanted to control or show their power and this show of violence was predominant in the lives of Southerners.

Richard turns violent many times like when he rebels against his father and kills the kitten in a fit of rage. Similarly when he burns down the house he gets thoroughly beaten. He overcomes his fear of the gang of boys by attacking them. Racial segregation or racial prejudices also instilled fear and mistrust in the society. This is evident in many of the episodes of the Black Boy. Richard afraid of his mothers beatings, his grandmother who forced him to follow certain religious rites, his reluctance to trust Uncle Hoskins or his teacher Miss Simons and his extreme distrust towards religion.

Another aspect of that period was that the blacks suffered violence even at the hands of their own family. They used fear and threat to control their own children. This was because they had suffered violence and hatred of the whites. They used the same means to control their children. The portrayal of the beatings inflicted on Wright by elders in his family including his mother aptly brings out this aspect. By selecting significant events of his life Wright is able to weave a story of a black male and the oppression he faces at the hands of the society.

At his first job he gets first-hand experience of the prejudices blacks face. Until then he had only heard about them. His employer, a white woman scolds and humiliates him expecting him to be obedient and servile because he is black. There is no decency or respect in that job. He refuses to return to his first job but then he realises that this racism and prejudice is present all over the South and that he cannot run away from it. In Chapter 10 of the book Wright is made to realise that he must obey and not challenge the whites even when they suppress him.

That was the order of the day during the 1990s in the South. At the end of Part I Richard decides that he will not be a slave like the other blacks. The knowledge that was denied to him because of his color and the education system that favoured the privileged white, he decides to assimilate by reading as many books as possible. These lines from an article, which compares this book with books by George Orwell and Ray Bradbury aptly describes Black Boy " these books, invite us to imaginatively recreate the experience of living within closed systems.

It tells us much about social breakdown and disorder in American life with a vividness sociological writing cannot provide." (Graham M. and Ward J, 1993}References1. Graham M. and Ward J, 1993, Article in "Black Boy (American Hunger): Freedom to Remember" published in Censored Books: Critical Viewpoints, Scarecrow Press, pp. 109-16.2. Wright Richard, 1945, Black Boy, Harper Perennial Modern Classics Published in 1998